Home Theatre PC inside a Nintendo 64

Posted 8 Jul 2014

A user over at linustechtips.com is working on a project that consists of putting a home theatre PC (HTPC) into a Nintendo 64 chassis. The main gist of this mod would be that rather than upgrading an N64 like most other mods I’ve seen, the modder completely repurposes the case to fit a PC motherboard inside of it.

The home theatre PC

From what it seems, the modder (a user known as SageC) wanted to make a home theatre PC out of a games console but thought that making it out of a NES would be a bit too generic, so he decided to go for a N64. The problem with this however, is that the Nintendo 64 is much thinner than a NES and not as boxy, which means that fitting all the components into the systems will require a bit of modding.

By the looks of it, he is going to make it work as a Nintendo 64 emulator by attaching N64 controller USB adapters to the PC. I have a couple of these adapters, and from my experience they don’t work very well so I’m sceptical about how well it will perform as a makeshift N64.

The funny thing about this mod is that since it’s a PC, the device is going to need a pretty powerful cooling system to make sure that the CPU doesn’t overheat. SageC overcomes this by using a ‘low profile’ cooler to keep it operational. I find this bit interesting because the N64 doesn’t really have much of a heat sink, it’s really just a slab of bent metal glued to the CPU and Co-processor which makes this look like overkill.

SageC then went on to paint it blue which kinda makes it look like a Pikachu N64 without the Pikachu. The latest update shows that he put the pieces together and he says that works fine with an OS installed into it.

The latest update (6 Jul 2014) says that it’s almost done and that there shouldn’t be more than a couple updates left. Hopefully we can see this project fully realised in the near future.